Cumbia Amazónica with the Legendary Los Wembler’s De Iquitos from The Amazon Basin of Peru

Mutliflora Productions presents Los Wembler’s as a part of its third annual DIY multicultural music festival series over two months in September and October across multiple venues in Washington, DC.

Presented in collaboration with Leon City Sounds and Multiflora Productions’s annual Flash of the Spirit music festival series! In 2007 Brooklyn label Barbès records released a 17-song compilation of a then ignored genre of psychedelic cumbia from Peru. That album, The Roots of Chicha, was essential in re-introducing the world to chicha music, a sound previously confined to the Amazon and the poorer neighborhoods of Lima. Though chicha originated in the 1970s, its particular blend of psych rock, surf, Afro-Latin rhythms and indigenous melodies proved to be particularly appealing to 21st century audiences. To many, especially in South America and Mexico, it came to be seen as the missing link between rock and tropical Latin music and was a key ingredient in the cumbia revival that has swept the Americas in the past ten years.

Los Wembler’s, who formed in 1968 in the Amazonian city of Iquitos, were responsible for some of the first hits of the psychedelic cumbia genre – including the iconic “Sonido Amazonico” and “Danza del Petrolero”. Los Wembler’s became widely popular in the Peruvian Amazon and for a dozen years and criss-crossed the region, with forays into neighboring Brazil and Colombia. In the mid 1980’s, however, touring mostly came to a stop and the band remained in Iquitos, playing mostly parties and local functions.Their new album, Vision del Ayahuasca, was written in Iquitos, where the band still lives, but recorded in Lyon, france, while the band was on its second European tour. Vision del Ayahuasca should establish further their legacy as pioneers not only of chicha and psychedelic cambia, but as a musicians who are finally getting their place in the world-wide pantheon of influential artists. Indeed, the latin psychedelia they helped create 50 years ago, is more relevant than ever and the album is a triumphant tribute to their lasting creative powers.